Will the nearly 800,000 Liberals who stayed home last time vote this time? Michael Ignatieff's future depends on it.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff stands on a box as he addresses a group at the Saint John Ale House in during a campaign stop in Saint John, N.B., Wednesday, April 20, 2011.

By:Susan DelacourtOttawa Bureau, Published on Sat Apr 23 2011

KITCHENER—For the past 30 years in Canadian politics, the federal Liberals’ biggest problems have been found within their own ranks.

Through the 1980s, 1990s and well into this 21st century, it was internal feuding over Liberal leadership. More recently, however, it’s plain, old apathy that’s proved to be the killer at the ballot box — all those Liberal-leaning voters who just didn’t bother to show up on election day in 2008.

By some estimates, those lazy Liberals numbered near 800,000 when Canada last went to the polls.

“Rise up,” has been Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s campaign call in the past week, ever since the televised leaders’ debates. “Wake up” is the message being sent out at the riding level in once-safe Liberal seats. But is anyone listening?

Last week, the Star went out to ground zero in terms of Liberal apathy — southern Ontario, and in particular, the ridings in Kitchener-Waterloo, where sleepy Liberals handed Conservatives two victories in 2008 merely by staying home.

Two long-time Liberal MPs, Karen Redman in Kitchener Centre and Andrew Telegdi in Kitchener-Waterloo, lost their seats in 2008 by very narrow margins. For Redman, it was a matter of a few hundred votes. For Telegdi, the loss was even more acute — if just 17 more people had turned up to vote for him, he would have kept his seat.

“Not again,” then, is the refrain around Telegdi’s headquarters in this campaign, with volunteers and signs flying in and out of the office as quickly as they can be dispatched. On an unseasonably chilly and wet Tuesday afternoon, the office is a hubbub of noise and activity, even as the candidate himself is holed away studying up for a big debate that evening.

Helen and Rick Hunt are part of the core staff in Telegdi’s office — the kind of Liberals he needs: newly energized, highly motivated to avoid another defeat by complacency. “Everybody just thought he’d win last time,” says Helen Hunt, who is keen to rattle off all the reasons that she believes Conservatives have to be stopped, starting in Kitchener on the night of May 2.

This is the first time they’ve poured this much effort into an election campaign. Rick Hunt, a retired police staff sergeant, is in charge of the signs, and he’s just ordered a new batch to fill burgeoning demand. Telegdi’s office in this campaign has put up three times the number of signs that it planted in the ground in 2008 — roughly 2,200 by week four.

Volunteer numbers have also swelled in Kitchener-Waterloo: roughly 400 signing up for duty by week four, compared to 100 for the whole campaign in 2008.

Nancy McCaffrey, just in from campaign duties around the riding, is one of them. She didn’t do anything much in 2008, “but I’m working now,” she says. McCaffrey says her best friend voted Green in the past election and has profound regrets — she didn’t think it would hurt Telegdi. “She’s voting Liberal this time, that’s for sure,” McCaffrey says.

Rick Hunt says he’s hearing this a lot. “The theme I get from people is that they were convinced a protest vote wouldn’t mean anything.” But as Telegdi’s campaign chair, Simon Tunstall, says: “The beauty of losing by 17 votes . . . is that it focuses the mind.” Tunstall has worked on Liberal campaigns at the provincial and federal level for many years and says that in terms of volunteers in Kitchener-Waterloo this time: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

In Kitchener-Centre, Redman goes door to door and reminds anyone who will listen about how close the vote was in 2008. The people who answer the door — many of them, fittingly, in pajamas — widen their eyes when she reminds them that she lost by just more than 300 votes.

“This is an election I don’t think anyone can afford to sit out,” Redman says to a Liberal-leaning woman who answers the door in a Kitchener subdivision, who admits she can’t remember if she voted in 2008. “It’s a real watershed moment for the country,” Redman says.

Redman too has volunteers who are newly motivated. Terry Riddoch, a real-estate broker and a once-active but lapsed Liberal, shows up early at 9 a.m. to knock on doors for Redman in Kitchener-Centre. So does Byron Weber Becker, a computer science professor, who also is pounding the pavement for the first time in this election, on behalf of Redman’s cause.

Riddoch says his head was turned by Ignatieff. At a distance, Riddoch wasn’t that impressed with the Liberal leader and showed up only “grudgingly” to see him speak at Redman’s headquarters at the campaign’s outset.

The blunt reality, though, is that none of this new Liberal energy has been showing up in the rolling polls of this campaign, and the real risk for Ignatieff is that the revitalization will give way to despair — or, given recent numbers, mass defection to the New Democrats.

Some pollsters are saying, however, that there is some numerical evidence to suggest that Liberals are waking up in 2011.

“There’s definitely some evidence that Liberal voters have become more enthusiastic about their leader in the last few months, which would normally translate into a better turnout rate than (former leader Stéphane) Dion was able to achieve,” says Bruce Anderson, citing Harris-Decima Research findings.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper “enjoyed a pretty substantial enthusiasm advantage over Mr. Ignatieff only a few months ago, (but) that gap has narrowed significantly, and almost exclusively due to improved feelings on the part of Liberal voters for the party leader,” says Anderson.

Jaideep Mukerji, a vice-president with Angus Reid polling firm, has found the same thing.

“The one thing I have noticed is that while the Liberals haven’t surged ahead in the way they have hoped over the course of the campaign, Liberals have warmed up to Michael Ignatieff,” Mukerji says. “He still trails the other leaders on approval rating among party faithful but it’s much better now than at the outset. Selling himself to non-Liberals hasn’t gone as well though.”

And that little postscript may have important implications as the campaign moves into the final week, with polls showing an NDP surge and Liberals continuing to flag.

Not far from Kitchener, in Guelph, Liberal incumbent Frank Valeriote is campaigning hard to keep the troops from falling asleep again. It’s estimated that 5,000 Liberals went AWOL in Guelph in 2008 and Valeriote wants them back. Asked why they stayed away the last time, Valeriote laughs diplomatically, smiles and moves on to the next question.

So does he think they’ll be back at the polls this time?

“Well, they told me they were voting in 2008 too, and then they didn’t show up,” he says. “So it’s hard to tell.”

This weekend, Ignatieff is taking to the airwaves, with an extraordinary, 30-minute-long infomercial to sell the Liberals’ message with just one week left in the campaign. It may well be interpreted as a cry of alarm. But when the fear is that Liberals will go to sleep again, as they did in 2008, an alarm may be what’s required to jolt the party out of its own apathy.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.